On the face of the rediscovered document was a promissory memorandum. Quoted by the Mirror, it read: ‘Colonel Doolan to pay Mr. Greenway two hundred and fifty pounds … in addition to the one thousand three hundred guineas for finishing the house, as follows’. The memorandum was ‘written in the character of Mr. Cooke’s hand-writing, but was sworn to be a forgery by many respectable witnesses’. Like all who have studied the details of the crime since the day of Greenway’s trial, the Mirror’s reporter was at a total loss to see any logic in Greenway’s actions:
The singularity of this forgery is, that it is difficult to trace the motive which could have actuated the prisoner to commit it – for had any fraud been effected, the amount would have gone to his Creditors, and not to himself; and those Creditors had already given him his certificate, so that he was, in point of fact, released from his debts. It appeared to be perfect insanity to counterfeit the signature of Mr. Cooke, as subscribing witness – since any man in his senses might have expected that it would be detected the moment the creditors began to enforce the covenants of the deed.
Ellis made the interesting observation that Greenway must have somehow thought he was righting a wrong with the forgery, that if the document did not exist then by rights it should. ‘Why, the act of seeing that the endorsement’, wrote Ellis, ‘which ought to be on the contract, was actually there must have seemed to Mr Greenway to be of veritable divine inspiration’.6
Unfortunately, no transcript of Greenway’s trial survives so it is impossible to gauge the cogency of his explanations. Under threat of his life, did the arrogant Francis Greenway strain to break free and utter words he might regret, or did the gravity of his plight and the sombre tone of the proceedings tether him to restraint? The trial wore on into the evening. Finally, the penultimate moment arrived and he was ‘placed at the bar’ and instructed by the recorder to plead. ‘Guilty’, uttered the small auburn-headed man in the velvet frock coat and cravat. According to the Mirror, Greenway’s plea was made ‘under direction of his friends, though not with the concurrence of his legal advisers’.
From the bench, Sir Vicary Gibbs stared down at the prisoner. Beneath the symbolic weight of the royal coat of arms, the recorder, ‘with the greatest humanity, represented to him the awful step he was taking’ and did not record his plea, ‘wishing to afford him time for further reflection’. Marked by a harsh public demeanour and a caustic wit that had earned him the sobriquet ‘Vinegar Gibbs’, Sir Vicary was nonetheless also known for an ‘undergrowth of kindly feelings’.7
Back in his cell, Greenway reflected on his sorry predicament through what must have seemed the longest night of his life. But when the court reconvened on Wednesday morning, he again pleaded guilty. Sir Vicary Gibbs then had no option but to place the black cap over his judicial wig and utter the dreaded words: ‘You shall be taken from this place to the place whence you came, and thence to the place of execution …’
With only the press reports to go by, details of what happened next lie frustratingly beyond reach. The drama of Greenway’s eleventh-hour reprieve can hardly be imagined, but it seems that the prisoner’s uncharacteristic humility through his ready admission of guilt ultimately saved his neck. The Mirror concluded:
the prisoner acted wisely, – as in consequence of having so done, and the prosecutor’s humanity in recommending him to mercy, added to the solicitations of the several Gentlemen of the highest respectability, the prisoner was given to understand, that the sentence of the law would probably not be executed upon him.
Before Sir Vicary Gibbs left town, Greenway was reprieved. His ultimate gamble had worked and, as Ellis put it, ‘his spinal column intact’ he was returned to Bristol Newgate to await transportation for the ‘term of Fourteen Years to the Coast of New South Wales’.8
So who were these ‘Gentlemen of the highest respectability’ who interceded just as Greenway imagined the hangman’s scaffold rising before his eyes? As usual, Greenway and the public record effectively left no clues. Ellis even notes the curious fact that ‘the only papers missing from the trial records of the Circuit for 1812 are those dealing with the sittings at which Greenway was tried’ – his inference being that they may have been deliberately removed by a person, or persons, of influence.9 It seems that as events unfolded, the bizarre tale of the crime and punishment of Francis Greenway, forger, became ever more tightly bound in knotted threads of contradiction and intrigue.
As for potential ‘Gentlemen of respectability’, John Lewis Auriol was hardly likely to be numbered among them, but could a member, or members, of the Howard family have been involved – even perhaps the Duke of Norfolk himself? Or were the prominent banking family the Harfords of Blaise Castle House near Bristol among his intercessors? A few years hence, his design for the Government House stables in Sydney would betray a familiarity with the Harfords’ picturesque country residence.
And then, of all men, there was Admiral Arthur Phillip, claimed by Greenway several years later to have ‘ever been his steady friend and patron’.10 At the time of Greenway’s trial, Phillip was approaching the final year of his life and was ailing. As a consequence, he may not have been party to the theatre of the courtroom or the recorder’s chambers. But despite his infirmity, Phillip may have been active offstage, and his connection with Greenway is nonetheless intriguing. His presence in the story reinforces the speculation that Greenway’s ‘greater destiny’ lay in New South Wales or, as historian Grace Karskens observed, ‘there is something suspiciously organised about both the crime and the manner in which Greenway embarked on his voyage of exile’.11
In 1793, at the end of his term as the first governor of New South Wales, Phillip had returned to England and then held a series of naval commands in the wars against the French before finally retiring in 1805. He settled in Bath, near Bristol, where he lived until his death. In 1811 Phillip and his wife Isabella visited Clifton and supposedly met Greenway there, but how the pair became further acquainted to the extent of Phillip becoming a ‘steady friend and patron’ is yet another conundrum among the mystifying details of Greenway’s English life.
Perhaps at their first or a subsequent meeting Phillip had pricked the architect’s interest in the colony of New South Wales. Surely here was a tabula rasa over which a sensitive artist such as he might be permitted free expression. And perhaps Greenway’s crime was that insane face-saving act, come to life and given an obtuse logic and stimulus through the reminiscences of the old admiral.
During his time in New South Wales, Phillip had been aware of the desperate need for skilled artisans; he had tried in vain to persuade Whitehall to send the likes of builders, carpenters, masons and skilled farm workers with the First Fleet, but instead was forced to draw on whatever talents he could find among the convict pool and a trickle of free settlers. In retirement he maintained a keen interest in the colony and continued to correspond with his friends there. Phillip had always seen the colony as more than a place of banishment. Envisaging a hub of European commercial expansion in the South Pacific, he had written to Admiral Sir Charles Middleton shortly after arriving in Port Jackson that ‘hereafter when this Colony is the seat of Empire, there is room for ships of all Nations’.12
As a child of the Enlightenment, Phillip also maintained an interest in town planning, and by July of 1788, not six months after the First Fleet’s arrival, he had produced a plan for a future town (to be named Albion) by the shores of Sydney Cove. Although, as Karskens observes, ‘Albion [was] less a real town than an elegant abstraction of authority, mathematics and the sea’,13 it nonetheless showed Phillip’s sensitivity to ideas of beauty and civic order, concepts that would have met a ready reception with Greenway.
As the old admiral grew feeble, and in memory no doubt part tender and part regretful for what was, and was not, achieved during his term as governor, perhaps he did feed the imagination of an unknown young architect from Bristol. In turn, then, perhaps it is not beyond reason to suggest that Philli
p, aware of the usefulness to the colony of a capable architect amid Whitehall’s stalling, somehow used his influence and helped engineer Greenway’s ‘greater destiny’.
Greenway’s destiny found him favoured, for a time, at Governor Macquarie’s table in far-off Sydney. With his crimes recently absolved through the granting of a conditional pardon, a respected place in colonial society surely lay ahead. On 26 January 1818, amid celebrations for the thirtieth anniversary of the colony, a dinner was held at Government House with a ball to follow. Greenway had painted a portrait of Phillip for the occasion. It was ‘suspended … in a wreath supported by two banners’ in the ballroom of Government House, and Greenway was said to have ‘felt much pleasure in [the] opportunity of celebrating the memory of the Vice Admiral [sic]’.14 The painting was possibly based on engravings taken from one of two portraits completed by Francis Wheatley in 1786 and 1787, the years immediately before the First Fleet’s departure from England. The latter formed the frontispiece of The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, published in 1789, a volume likely to be readily at hand in Sydney Town. But is it also too fanciful to suggest that Greenway the painter may have made his own portrait studies of Phillip and carried them to New South Wales, carefully tucked away in his portfolio of architectural drawings, a souvenir of a ‘friend and patron’ from another time and another world?
Reprieved from the gallows and awaiting transportation, Francis Greenway was to be incarcerated in Bristol Newgate for many months. It was usual in the 19th-century British penal system for the convicted to be returned to the prison from whence they were tried. From there they would be delivered in groups to convict gaols or to prison hulks moored at Woolwich on the Thames, or in ports such as Portsmouth or Plymouth, before finally being loaded onto convict transports for their journey into exile. For most, it was a journey from which they would never return.
BRISTOL NEWGATE: ‘WHITE WITHOUT AND FOUL WITHIN …’
The third child born to Francis and Mary Greenway was baptised ‘Francis John’ at St James Priory Church, Bristol, on 12 February 1814, but the boy would never grow to know Bristol or England. Cradled in Mary’s arms, and with brothers George and William by his mother’s side, baby Francis left for good just two weeks later, embarked on the arduous journey undertaken by many families to be reunited with their convict menfolk. The baptism must have been a subdued occasion without the presence of the baby’s father, but lest misadventure strike on the arduous 14 000-mile passage to Sydney, a Christian baptism was as important a preparation as the sorting of the few possessions Mary would be able to take to their new life.
Later census records imply that Francis was probably born in the months immediately before his baptism. He was therefore most likely conceived at some time in late 1812 or early 1813 while his father was in prison.1 But such a simple chronology begs an obvious question – how had connubial relations continued during Francis senior’s incarceration in such a grim place as Bristol Newgate? All firsthand observers described the Bristol prison as squalid and overcrowded, much like London’s own notorious Newgate. Putting aside any thought that the child was not Francis Greenway’s, it seems an unlikely setting in which a husband and his visiting wife could be afforded even a moment of privacy.
Prisons of the era were often not the places of tight segregation we might recognise today. Prostitutes touted for business and peddlers sold gin and other unwholesome wares to those with a little money craving a temporary reprieve from their wretchedness. Whole families, destitute and desperate, might crowd into the confines of the gaol. They shared the little space available with those awaiting trial; the sentenced and the condemned; a motley menagerie of domestic animals; and battalions of rats, mice and lesser vermin.
So, then, did Mary Greenway endure prison life cohabiting with her husband, and there subject her children to this wholly unsavoury place? If so, she probably had no choice. Perhaps she came and went as the pressures of raising a young family demanded, but without knowledge of her circumstances before her marriage, it is impossible to guess at what arrangements prevailed. Yet as much as Francis appears to have shown impressive forbearance throughout his ordeal, so too Mary, either as a part-time resident or regular visitor, kept their family together with an admirable display of courage and fortitude. They were qualities that would stand her in good stead throughout her married life.
Bristol Newgate had been a place of punishment since medieval times. Rebuilt in the 1690s, it had housed homosexuals, Quakers and nonconformists, and the 18th-century poet and satirist Richard Savage, who died there in 1743, had been one of the prison’s better known debtor inmates. John Howard, the first English penal reformer, visited Newgate in 1775, describing the prison, with its whitewashed exterior, as ‘white without and foul within’.2 Fellow reformer and philanthropist James Neild noted that the good burghers of Bristol had agreed to a new prison 20 years before his 1812 visit.3 ‘That it has not been carried into execution by this rich commercial City, is much to be regretted’, wrote Neild, ‘for really the present Gaol is disgraceful’.4
Old lags and petty criminals, debtors, highwaymen and murderers, women, young children, youths and men were routinely ‘crowded together by night, to such a degree as to excite surprise that they should escape suffocation’.5 One visitor gave a graphic description of a notorious dungeon known as ‘The Pit’. Located below street level and close to the waters of the River Frome, The Pit was only ‘about fourteen feet square by about eight feet high’:
This hole had for some time … been the sleeping room of sixteen convicts under sentence of transportation; and should any person now be so sceptical as to … the miseries inflicted upon the wretched Africans in the ‘middle passage,’ they may be made evident to more than one of his senses, by a visit to this room …
The barrack-bedsteads are placed on each side of the room, leaving a passage of about a foot and a half between them. When sixteen persons are stretched on these beds, the place, like a slave ship, must have the appearance of being floored with human beings! There is in it a small window, doubly or trebly irongrated, but so faint is the light admitted, even during brilliant sun-shine, that it was not perceptible when a small lighted candle was in the room.6
One of the prison turnkeys had remarked to Neild that when he unlocked the door of The Pit each morning ‘he was so affected by the putrid steam issuing from the dungeon, that it was enough to strike him down’.7 In fulfilment of James Neild’s hopes, construction of a new prison was begun nearby in 1816, and Bristol Newgate was finally demolished in 1820.8
Even allowing for some colour in contemporary descriptions tailored to the social agendas of reformers such as Neild, Francis Greenway’s stretch in Bristol Newgate still seems beset by inconsistencies. Not only did he and Mary appear to enjoy at least some of the normal benefits of marriage, Francis also remained artistically productive during this most dire time in his life. The mere mechanics of his creativity seem greatly at odds with the prevailing descriptions of his enforced surroundings.
It seems probable that while he awaited transportation, one or more of Greenway’s patrons or friends – those ‘Gentlemen of the highest respectability’ from his trial – now eased a path through his incarceration. In the privately run gaols of the era, a prisoner’s life could be made bearable through extra, though often crippling, payments to their unscrupulous gaolers, and by donations of food, bedding and clothing from family, friends and charitable strangers. Prisoners paid on their entry into the prison, and even those who were acquitted of their alleged crimes were expected to pay prison fees upon their release. Those who could pay the most were provided with their own cell and even the services of a cleaner or maid. If Mary Greenway did spend any significant time in Bristol Newgate with her husband, such relatively tolerable accommodation may have been organised for them at a price.
Through July and August 1812, Greenway laboured on two oil paintings depicting prison life.9 His access to materials – paint, canvas,
an easel and the like – and to the space in which to work without frequent disturbance, again speaks of favoured treatment. The paintings are not large – each measures slightly less than 17 by 27 inches – but they are doggedly detailed and accurately observed. Both are set in an open-air yard nicknamed the ‘Tennis Court’, one of only two small outdoor spaces in the prison. Strong shadows glance down from above, and unsurprisingly, given Greenway’s professional predilections, the court’s massive stone walls and barred windows are rendered with a forbidding attention to detail. The Mock Trial depicts a ragtag group of manacled prisoners reliving the judgment of the law. They point, gesture, smoke and mutter to one another as a particularly decrepit figure dressed in rags addresses the gathering. Fresh thefts are committed even as the justice of the mob is enacted. In the second, untitled painting, prisoners pass idle hours playing cards, drinking and stealing from one another. Children, themselves also in chains, peer in through an open doorway.
Greenway appears to have also included himself in each work. In The Mock Trial, a well-dressed figure in a tailcoat is seated on the left. As he makes an aside to someone just out of the scene, his ear is tickled with a clay pipe. While his attention is thus diverted, a willing urchin reaches around and deftly picks his pocket. In the companion painting, the same figure appears to be reporting the theft, while in the background a pocket watch is dangled over a card game. Dickens’ Artful Dodger would have been at home in Greenway’s Bristol Newgate, but as Broadbent and Hughes observed, for all the careful attention to detail there is little sense of the wretchedness of the contemporary written accounts.10 Instead, there is a naïve staginess that may simply betray Greenway’s limitations as an artist. There is none of the biting satire of William Hogarth, who, in the eight paintings of A Rake’s Progress (1732–33), depicted the downward journey of a spendthrift and womaniser to the degradation of the debtor’s prison, and ultimately to the hellish madness of Bedlam.
A Forger's Progress Page 5